1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of managing locations of information and an information location management device, and more particularly to a method of managing locations of information and an information location management device, for controlling locations of predetermined pieces of information existing on the network.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, with the development of computers and the network system, it has become possible to collect desired pieces of information existing on the network. For example, a WWW (World Wide Web) as a document system on the internet has got into widespread use to form a worldwide huge WWW network. However, it is not easy to extract necessary information from such enormous amounts of information. As a solution, an RSS (Rich Site Summary) reader which is designed to collect information from websites (Web sites) is now starting to be widely used. The RSS reader has the function of crawling websites to automatically collect updated information written in RSS on the websites, and displaying the collected information. The user can collect up-to-date information on the websites without crawling the websites by himself. The RSS reader makes it possible to dramatically improve the efficiency of collecting information provided by the websites.
Further, as a method of managing locations of information, bookmarking provided by browsers is known. The user can register locations of desired websites in bookmarks. The following description is given assuming that the location of an information resource is indicated using a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) which is a most popular indication method. Bookmarking makes it possible to immediately access necessary websites.
However, information necessary for users changes with time. In view of this, an address management method has been proposed in which the respective counts of access to websites are monitored, and when the access count of a website exceeds a predetermined reference value for website addition, the URL of the website is added to a list of bookmarks, whereas when the same does not exceed the predetermined reference value, the URL of the website is deleted from the list (e.g. see Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2002-49541 (FIG. 9)). Further, as a method of managing email addresses, there has been known a technique in which the frequency of use of each email address for email transmission and reception over a predetermined time period is determined, and the email addresses are managed according to the frequency of use of each address (e.g. see Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2002-197027 (FIG. 2)).
However, the conventional method of managing locations of information suffers from the problem that the management of locations where desired information is stored becomes a great burden.
Although the RSS reader is very effective in collecting information from designated websites, the user has to register websites to be crawled in advance, and hence there is a problem that it is necessary for users to do some extra work. Although a method of registering websites which are accessed at a high frequency in the list of bookmarks is disclosed, the user has to find new websites from which information is to be obtained, as a preliminary step by himself. The user is required to find out such new websites from which information is to be obtained e.g. by a search using a search engine, or by searching for links to necessary information from the information currently registered in the list.
Further, if information becomes unnecessary, websites registered therefor have to be deleted from the list. Although a method of deleting websites which are accessed at a low frequency from the list of bookmarks is disclosed, it is difficult to apply the method directly to the RSS reader which crawls the registered websites to automatically collect information therefrom.
Information which a user desires to collect changes as the time elapses. Particularly, information necessary for business incessantly changes, and hence it is very difficult to continuously do maintenance on the list. For this reason, maintenance has not been done on the list, which often makes the list less associated with the situation of the user, e.g. due to the fact that the information from websites to be crawled which are registered on the list has become unnecessary, or locations of necessary information have not been registered. As a result, the user cannot obtain useful information.